Created by Inner Strength Education, this podcast brings the Inner Strength vibe to you with accessible mindfulness sessions whether you're navigating classes, work, friends, stress, feelings, boredom, or any of the other distractions we all feel from time to time. These practices are practical, fun, and easy to return to—whether you have two minutes on the move or you're winding down at night.
You don’t need to clear your mind... Just press play, breathe, and make a little room inside.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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This guided visualization takes you back 600 years to experience life without choices or complexity. You'll notice what was simpler and what you'd miss about today. A creative way to gain perspective on modern stress and your own path forward.
Why this helps? Imagining life 600 years ago helps you appreciate both positives and challenges of now.
Welcome to Inner Strength Meditations. Let's take a moment. Let's travel back in time. Take your best mindfulness posture with your spine tall, vertebrae stacked one on top of another, and your head balanced, just at the top of your neck, letting yourself feel at ease and ready to explore.
You can choose a beautiful shape or color in the room and just rest your eyes on that beautiful shape or color. Or you can close your eyes to allow your imagination to take over. Imagine
yourself six hundred years ago in a village, anywhere in the world that you'd like to be, what's the weather like? What's the environment like? What are the trees like?
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Do you hear birds or animals? Or water?
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So when you've clearly pictured where you are, imagine that you're in bed, and you're probably sleeping on a mattress on the floor, or a blanket, or a straw mat. And most likely you'd have a few siblings in the same room as you. If it was cold, maybe you'd be curled up together under the same blanket.
You get up very early in the morning, it's still dark. You go and you take care of the animals, watering them and feeding them, letting them out to roam around the yard or the field. Once the animals are taken care of, you come back in, you have a bite to eat, you know exactly what you're going to eat because you eat the same thing during that season every day, every year. Maybe in the summer there are certain fruits that are ripe. And in the winter, certain grains that you have. Maybe you eat a flatbread, or maybe you have rice, maybe you have a porridge, but it tastes the same. You look forward to it, you know what it's going to be, it warms your belly, and you don't need to choose.
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Then you run out into the village.
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Everyone knows your name, they call out hello. If your family are farmers, you're running to the fields to weed or to plant or to harvest. All your friends are doing the same thing. You run along the pathway together as far as you can. And every season is the same. You know exactly how high the plants are going to be and what your job's going to be. You work alongside your parents or your neighbors or both.
When the holidays come, you all gather together. You all know the same songs. You sing them together. You have traditional dances that you do on the holidays. And it's fun, everyone enjoys and everybody knows. They're not new year by year. But new people learn to sing, or new people learn how to play the instruments, and that's always fun and exciting. And as you get older, you know exactly what you're going to do. If you're a girl, you'll follow in your mother's footsteps, taking care of the animals, the fields, and the house, and the children. And if you're a boy, you'll follow in your father's footsteps.
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If he has a trade, you'll likely follow in that trade. Because it's tradition.
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You learn from your elders and you learn from stories. There's no school. The work you do is a younger version of the adult work. So let yourself experience what it's like to go back in time. Let yourself experience the simplicity, how you know where you belong, you know who's around you, you know what you're going to be, you know who to talk to if you have a worry. You know who is wise in the village.
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And you know where you fit. Allow yourself to feel the simplicity, feel the ease, feel the surety.
And now let's step out of our time capsule and take a moment to think about the good sides of 600 years ago and the not-so-good sides. Because they're not so good sides as well. And I'll let you use your imagination to come up with the not-so-good sides and the good sides.
You can live anywhere in the world, picture where that will be. You can live in any house you want to, picture what that would be. And now just think, how many choices do you have? With global travel, with movies and television. You've been able to see what life is like all over the world. And if you're wondering, with a click of a your device, your handheld phone or your computer, you could go anywhere in the world and see what it looks like. You could go to New Zealand or Central Africa to the Congo, or you could go to Peshawar, or Belize. You could go anywhere. So picture just right now the amount of choice you have and the fact that you know or can know so much about where you're choosing to be. Now
wake up in your house, whether it's in LA or Philadelphia or Costa Rica or Canada, and you go downstairs, and you decide what you're going to eat. Open the cupboards. How many choices do you have? Or maybe you need to run to the store. You need to run to the 24-hour supermarket and get something for breakfast. You walk down the cold cereal aisle. There are literally a hundred cold cereal boxes to choose from. And if you don't want cold cereal, you could have a breakfast burrito. Or you could have vegan eggs and vegan sausage. You could have anything. Think about how many choices. Any time of year. Even in the middle of winter, if you live in the north, you could have grapefruits. So many choices. That means you can have exactly what you want.
Now think about when you walk out of your house, wherever you are right now, how many different people you'll meet. And if you're in a city somewhere, you might meet people from all over the world who have traveled there. Not just the people who were born there. And you might see your relatives who now live in different parts of the country. Or you could call them up on the phone and have a video call with them, no matter where they are, what time zone they're in. So many choices and so many ways to connect.
Maybe you get on the bus to go to school and you have to decide what you're going to listen to. What's going to be your playlist of the morning? And if you don't like that song, you can change it. And you can access any of the streaming music applications, and you could get world music from anywhere in the world. You could listen to Ukrainian folk songs if you wanted, or Baroque flute, or hip hop from the 70s, a long time ago. Or you could listen to a new release from a local band or spoken word that your friend made and recorded and is set up on streaming. So many choices. Training and clubs and the regular core subjects. Maybe you're learning virtually right now. And maybe you have to tap into a different application and study with a different teacher. So much available and so many choices.
Pop out of your time capsule. Think about the positives, the creativity, the individuality, your uniqueness, your passions, the way you can learn anything you love. Think about the downside, the negatives of always needing to pick and choose and make decisions all of the time and keep all of it straight. In any system and in any culture, we're influenced by changes around us that affect our personal experience. And in any time and in any culture, there are going to be positives and there are going to be negatives to that time.
Next time you're feeling so many of the negatives of this time of life, as a teenager or at this time in history, think about all that it took to get here and all that's possible. And appreciate positives of this side in the middle of the challenges and stresses you're feeling. As you start thinking in systems more and more, and seeing yourself as a part of big systems, you're going to find a magic key that's going to help you see the right next step and see the pathway forward and see the right people to talk to and see the way to choose without worrying that you're making the wrong choice. Recognizing that of all these different options, you'll choose one and you'll follow that path, and you'll be able to learn and grow and discover from where it's going to lead you.
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